The Love-Charm of Bombs (22 page)

Rose Macaulay mocks Kitty here, and by extension she mocks herself. Kitty, capable, detached, treating life as a ‘decidedly entertaining' game, inherits Macaulay's own public persona. But all the time that she thinks she is in control of her own part in the flirtation, she is in fact plummeting into a passion that she is no better able to restrain than Chester. She begins sleeping badly, ‘her thoughts turning and twisting in her brain'. Then the two of them are caught in a futuristic street aeroplane when something goes wrong with the machinery and they crash to the ground. Kitty bangs her head and faints; Chester believes her dead. Once she awakes he informs her, with ministerial restraint, ‘I have bitten my tongue and fallen in love.' Kitty becomes giddy, finding that seas seem ‘to rush past her ears'. Asked what she feels, she replies, ‘cool and yet nervous, “I expect I feel pretty much the same as you do about it.” '

Five years later, Macaulay reworked the scene in
Told by an Idiot
, a family saga that takes its central characters from the Victorian to the Georgian period. This is a detached novel, which does not dwell in the heads or hearts of any of its characters for long, but two women emerge as heroines, and both fall problematically in love. The first and most sustained heroine is Rome Garden, ‘negligent, foppish and cool', an urbane thirty-one-year-old who likes ‘to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts'. She falls in love, requitedly, with Mr Jayne, another brilliant, laconic and ‘gracefully of the world worldly' man, whom Rome finds ‘conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive and disarming, and the most companionable man of her wide acquaintance'. Both coolly English, they refrain from confessing their love until in a moment of unrestrained passion Mr Jayne insists that they should stop pretending: ‘I love you more than any words I've got can say. You know it, you know it . . . dear heart . . .' He draws her up from her chair and looks into her face, ‘and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.'

Macaulay repeatedly reimagined not only the initial meeting but the dilemma that keeps the lovers apart. In
What Not
, she shied away from adultery. Instead, Chester and Kitty are unable to be together because Chester has mental deficiency in his family and so, in the new order set up by the Ministry of Brains, is uncategorised, and forbidden to marry. Kitty, meanwhile, is class A, and must therefore marry and reproduce with someone of her own rank. Although this is intended to seem laughable to the reader, both of them take the Ministry seriously enough for it to keep them apart. Initially, they agree to mere friendship, but Chester finds the ‘farce' of their ‘beastly half-way house' intolerable, maintaining that they have to be ‘more to each other – or less'. He urges Kitty to marry him secretly but she, high-minded, refuses. ‘Let's be sporting,' he pleads; ‘We're missing – we're missing the best thing in the world . . . I thought you never turned your back on life'; ‘My dearest dear, I love you. Can't you . . . can't you? . . .' ‘I love you,' she returns; ‘I think I worship you.' But they agree to separate, and as they walk on together, the April afternoon itself cries out to them in its beauty, ‘like a child whom they were betraying and forsaking'.

The separation does not last. ‘The fact remained,' the narrator declares, with the wisdom of personal experience, that ‘when two people who love each other work in the same building, however remote their spheres, they disturb each other, are conscious of each other's nearness.' Kitty is very far from being ‘amused, interested, concerned' by her own feelings; she is struck by that ‘continual, disturbing, restless, aching want'; ‘no longer may life be greeted with a jest and death with a grin'. In the middle of the night, with aching, fevered head she writes Chester notes promising to marry him whenever he likes. But waking up, she is determined to give him his chance to stick by his principles. In the end, his presence overpowers her resolve. Seeing him again after several months, she admits that there is no good in living ‘if you can't have what you want'. Chester announces that he has wanted her ‘extremely badly these last three months. I have never wanted anything so much.' The two agree to get married.

In
Told by an Idiot
Macaulay made the obstacles separating the lovers more realistic, confronting the subject of adultery.
Mr Jayne, like O'Donovan, is married. But Macaulay protected Rome from moral infamy by making Mr Jayne's wife less palpably present than Beryl O'Donovan. She is a mad Russian woman, safely hidden away in Russia, whom Mr Jayne can honestly claim never to have loved. Nonetheless, Rome is principled. ‘I'm not,' she insists, ‘going to take you away from your wife.' Mr Jayne avows that ‘his love, his passion, his spirit, and his soul' are Rome's alone and encourages her to see civilisation as an arbitrary construct ‘of society's making, that binds the spirit's freedom in chains'. The two endure a winter in which civilisation fights ‘its losing battle with more primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr Jayne'. Rome maintains that they can only be friends; Mr Jayne is unable to meet her with self-control; Rome retreats to ‘the city of that name' with her father.

However, Mr Jayne follows his beloved to Italy and, spending time with the man she loves, walking in the warm sunlit air, Rome is ‘caught into a deep and intoxicated joy':

 

The bitter, restless struggling of the last months gave way to peace; the happy peace that looks not ahead, but rejoices in the moment. The tall and gay companion strolling at her side, so fluent in several languages, so apt to catch a half-worded meaning, to smile at an unuttered jest, so informed, so polished, so of the world worldly . . . take Mr Jayne as merely that, and she had her friend and companion back again, which was deeply restful and vastly stimulating. And beneath that was her lover, whom she loved; beneath his urbane exterior his passion throbbed and leaped, and his deep need of her cried, and in her the answering need cried back.

 

Ensconced in this moment of idyllic mutual need, Rome responds more favourably to Mr Jayne's sense that their fates are entwined. Although she still favours the claims of civilisation, and of his wife and children, she admits that neither of them can be ‘happy, or fully ourselves, without being together'. She promises to take a week to decide, and he lifts his hands to her face. ‘You are so beautiful,' he says, speaking, according to his self-deprecating narrator, ‘inaccurately';

 

There is no one like you . . . You hold my life in your two hands. Be kind to it, Rome.
I love you, I love you, I love you
. If we deny our love we shall be blaspheming. Love like ours transcends all barriers, and well you know it. Take your week, if you must, only decide rightly at the end of it, my heart's glory.

 

For an Oxford-educated, quintessential English gentleman, Mr Jayne sounds suspiciously Irish here. For an atheist who is irritated when Rome strays into religious arguments, he also sounds distinctly Christian. Mr Jayne is so closely associated with Gerald O'Donovan that he slips into his voice. His argument, that love transcends barriers, and that to deny the gift of love is to blaspheme, comes straight out of O'Donovan's own account of the relationship in his novel
The Holy Tree
, which had been published a year earlier. After Gerald's death, Rose Macaulay described this book to Rosamond Lehmann as ‘his real work, the one I love'. ‘In it,' she wrote, ‘he put his whole philosophy of love, through the medium of Irish peasants – all the things he used to say to me about love and life, all he felt about me, all we both knew.'

The heroine of
The Holy Tree
is a passionate, uneducated Irish girl called Ann. Times are hard and Ann marries a decent but prosaic man called Joe without love, in order to save her family from bankruptcy. All the time she yearns for love, and is struck by it, innocently and delightedly, when Brian appears from afar, bringing with him dreams of founding a new and saintly community in the town. She becomes ‘weak to think of him, or to talk of him'; he ‘was always in her dreams. And, when she woke in the night, it was like as if he was in the room with her.' From the start, religious and human sensuality fuse in Ann and Brian's love. During their first kiss she has the sense of being ‘in a holy place'; ‘It wasn't on the earth at all they stood, but before the throne of God.' She walks in a new world, infused with the soul of her lover. Brian tells her that love is ‘the wonder of God' ; not ‘the flesh alone, or the spirit alone, but the perfect union of them both'.

When Ann is swayed by the disapproval of her family, and of her community, Brian quotes the Yeats poem from which the book takes its title:

 

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

 

Obediently, Ann looks into her heart and sees the holy tree, ‘the like of which never grew and blossomed in the world before'. But she, like Kitty and Rome and like Macaulay herself, is swayed by convention. She realises that she cannot have both Brian and her child, Bessie, who is ‘woven into the very woof of her heart'. She sees, like Kitty, that she must allow Brian to live according to his own principles so that he can fulfil his great plans. ‘A sort of god he was among the people, the way he worked on them . . . Real love was to add to his power for the good of the world.' She will ‘offer up her love to save him', sacrificing herself for the higher good.

Brian is distressed by her decision. He pleads with her to return to the holy tree, and not to look instead in the ‘bitter glass'. He insists, like Mr Jayne, that they will be ‘two stunted souls wandering about the world . . . unsatisfied desire searing our souls as well as our flesh'. ‘It's life or death now,' he urges her; ‘Life is the adventure of the soul . . . the only one.' But she remains firm, and it is only after he goes away to try to help rescue a boat that she realises she has made a mistake. Waiting for her lover to return, Ann resolves to deny him nothing: ‘He was the light of the world and the light in her heart.' But Brian dies in the rescue attempt. Joe, returning safely, tells Ann that Brian was too reckless to survive. Ann realises that by rejecting Brian, ‘she broke the dream in him'. And now, by dying, he has broken the dream in her.

The Holy Tree
was a warning and a commendation to Rose Macaulay. In 1918, unwilling to embark on an affair with a married man, she came close to breaking Gerald's dream. By 1922, when the novel was published, they were lovers; she had found the holy tree in her heart. He celebrated that tree, but reminded her of the price they would both pay, were she to change her mind. In
Told by an Idiot
Rose accepted both the tribute and the lesson. Before Rome has a chance to make up her mind about her lover, Mr Jayne's Russian wife returns and has her husband abruptly murdered. Rome is bereft by Mr Jayne's untimely death. She is overcome by ‘a faint weariness, as if nothing were very much worth while'. ‘My dear,' she whispers, ‘in tears, to the unanswering, endless night', ‘Come back to me, and I will give you anything and everything . . . But you will never come back, and I can give you nothing any more.' Rose herself had been granted the chance to repair her mistake, and was keenly aware of what she might have lost.

Once Rose and Gerald committed to each other as lovers, they were able to find ways to see each other frequently. Both travelled extensively, and so it was easy to prolong their separate travels to spend time together. Between these trips, they met in London. At the beginning of their relationship they were seen together publicly, but then, fearing gossip, they became more secretive. Their love affair was known only to a handful of people, with Victor Gollancz later describing it as ‘the best-kept secret in London'. Publicly, they retained the pretence of friendship. Rose was even invited regularly to Sunday lunch in the O'Donovans' home, accepted (with misgivings) by Beryl as a family friend. Indeed, she acted as godmother to the O'Donovans' granddaughter Mary Anne.

Rose and Gerald's relationship blended companionship, love and sexual passion. Friends and acquaintances tended to doubt Rose's sexual proclivities, perhaps because Rose Macaulay's public persona was both too briskly matter-of-fact and too quirkily eccentric to be immediately feminine or sensual. Several friends saw her as less an embodied woman than a disembodied voice booming down the telephone. Looking back on his first meeting with her in the 1920s, Anthony Powell recalled her as ‘at immediate impact, prim, academic, rather alarming . . . It all seemed very chilly and Cambridge.' In fact nothing could, he said, have been further from a true assessment of her character. But not everyone made it through the chilly exterior. During an acrimonious exchange with the rivalrous popular novelist Ethel Mannin in 1931, Storm Jameson was outraged to be told that she was ‘the clearest case of sexual frustration she knows of except Rose Macaulay'. Three years earlier, Woolf had made the dismissive reference to Macaulay as a withered virgin, announcing to her sister that she had never ‘felt anyone so utterly devoid of the sexual parts'.